Customer Service Depends On Leadership, All The Way To The CEO And C-Suite

Customer Service is a leadership issue. It requires involvement from company leaders and managers, including the support (both philosophically and in the allocation of resources) of the C-Suite: the CEO, the COO, the CFO, the CTO, and certainly the CMO–if the CMO is aware and au courant enough to realize that customer service is an essential part of today’s marketing mix.

Unfortunately, customer service isn’t always thought of this way. It’s more often looked at as a (quote unquote) lower-level concern, wholly dependent on, and entirely the domain of, the frontline customer service agents upon whose performance service ultimately rests.

But if you send your customer service reps and customer support agents to training (and as a customer service trainer, I welcome them, every day!) while at the same time fail to support them via your company leadership, the exercise is going to fall flat.

Why? Because so many factors that make up the performance of a frontline customer service employee are dependent on decisions made higher up on the organization.

Has company leadership provided empowerment so that frontline customer service employees can make the pro-customer decisions needed to provide great service in unexpected circumstances? Or is any employee initiative shut down from the get-go; are they required to rigidly adhere to scripts and policies that inevitably will fail to address every possible customer need and desire?

Have company leaders allocated the resources necessary for great customer service by these frontline employees? You can have the best CSR in the world, but if she or he is handling more phone lines than she can reasonably provide great service on, the situation is a setup for failure. Likewise, if the company hasn’t invested in adequate equipment and software to serve customers speedily and seamlessly, and in all the ways and channels that they’ve grown to expect at the great customer-focused companies.

Has company leadership invested in finding and implementing a methodology that supports the recruiting and selection of frontline customer-facing employees who have the right personality makeup—the right traits–for customer service? If not, nobody is going to be happy, not your employee, not your customers, and not the bottom line of your business. (More on how to recruit and hire for customer-facing positions here.)

Finally, back to customer service training. While training of customer-facing employees is essential (and, as a customer service trainer, comprises much of what I do daily), it is best complemented, if budgets permit, with management training in customer service as well. So my final leadership question is this: Has leadership invested in such training–and attended it themselves?

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Certainly, much of customer service success does depend on the performance of frontline, customer-facing employees. But that success is impossible to pull off and sustain in a vacuum, a leaderless vacuum. If you’re wondering why your customer service performance seems stuck in a rut, look for ways to further involve leadership.